When the Government named the massive hospital they were building, in an Abu Dhabi-owned building, ‘Florence Nightingale Hospital’, I spat out half of my last remaining gin and tonic. (Never mind toilet paper; I’ve heard there’s a Fever Tree shortage.) The minute that name was out there, you could see the media messaging strategy being formed. The narrative of the selfless individual heroic nurse is a brilliant (if rather obvious) way to hide the massive socio-economic failure of austerity that helped to bring us to this point.
Myth Today
French structuralist/ post-structuralist Roland Barthes should be the man of the moment . His book Mythologies provides a more pertinent than ever analysis of the use of generic, intertextual, highly emotive stories and images, which often seem to have lasted for time immemorial. They are recirculated endlessly by our cultures: by the press, by images, text, by stories. He calls these myths ‘a type of speech’ or discourse - a type of heightened speech and imagery designed to create and secure ideology. Most of all, they persuade us that what is cannot be otherwise. Nostalgia is rarely far away. History is one of its most common tools.
The Tories have always been the most astonishing purveyors of myth - as conservatives, they operate at myth’s heartlands - blood and soil, history as an anchor, as tradition. And myths act as a way of persuading people that the way the world is, when it is under conservative control is not just ‘the way things have always been’, but also ‘the way things have to be’.
The word here is an ugly one, that Microsoft’s spellchecker always underlines: dehistoricisation. It’s the process of turning what is history, and hence the product of specific conditions (in the Marxian sense, as made by men, albeit not in conditions of their own choosing) into something which is outside of history, and beyond man’s direct influence. It tries to turn ideology, politics, economy, and the decisions of humans into things which are as natural as gravity or the music of the spheres.
World War Two
Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson are dab hands at this, although they are really only doing what Tory culture, since its inception, was born to do. It was no accident that Barthes was initially writing at the height of Gaullism. If there is a change, it is perhaps simply the sheer effrontery of its obviousness, its cynically fully-awake deployment - and the fact that it has been so enthusiastically swallowed by the public in the last three or four years. Cummings and Johnson aren’t enormously imaginative. But they don’t need to be. Myth simply builds on existing stories, and works to recirculate them repeatedly so that they become stronger and stronger. They can then be deployed to any ideological purpose - usually nefarious.
As we know, Brexit was all about Plucky Little Britain standing up against the rest of the world. And now, the myth of WWII has been relied on to explain the bungled and nonsensical strategy of tackling coronavirus, just as much as it was for justifying the economic meltdown likely to follow Brexit. There have been ongoing suggestions in media briefings of a war footing, personifications of the virus to the extent that it sometimes seems that Coronavirus is a sentient villain like Adolf Hitler. It worked all too well. There was even a veritable charcuterie counter of Gammons telling people that they were not privy to the Government’s secret strategy because this was a time of war - you couldn’t let people know all your tactics! Yes, don’t let the virus know, that sneaky little blighter with a silly moustache and only one ball.
The thing about myths, about dehistoricisation, is that they pull away all of the political, social, and economic contingenciesof history just to create a useful story. The British myth for all seasons is that we will pull through this because we pulled through The War. We have all seen, I’m sure, the Baby Boomer obsession about how ‘everyone pulled together’ in WWII. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, ‘we’ all came together and forgot ‘our’ petty differences - and because of that, after the war, we were more united as a country, a kinder nation where we looked after each other. And then we decided, in one fell swoop, to create the welfare state to show what kind of a wonderful nation we are.
Meanwhile, I’m tired of hearing people tell me, as an accepted truth, that the stockpiling of toilet paper, and the growth of a black market in hand sanitiser and face masks, is evidence of how far we have fallen as a nation since the second world war, in our kindness and human decency. This myth of WWII also helps those who feel nostalgia about a world that existed before the young ’uns ruined everything with their rudeness and Hippety-hop music and racial equality.
Any scant look at historical records and sources beyond propaganda will tell you this is false (or go for a brilliant and exhaustive look like ‘Austerity Britain’ by David Kynaston). In reality, the black market was everywhere, and viciously gouged everyone. A whole new class of exploiters grew up (the infamous ‘Spiv’). The wealthy lorded it over the poor and resented the fact that working class people’s standards slightly improved - and now one had to struggle to get a pheasant for the weekend. Meanwhile, crime, especially petty theft, went through the roof, especially immediately after the war when there were fewer police and people in authority around. The welfare state after the War was resisted tooth and nail by the middle classes and the upper classes, while the upper classes dreamed of a revolution that would overthrow the new Labour government by violent means. Many of the working classes thought the welfare state was a bad idea because it gave people something for nothing - helping the undeserving poor.
And let’s not forget that even the oldest believers in the myth of WWII don’t eactually remember the war - or do so only as much as I remember the seventies: for them, Woolton Pie and Air Raid shelters, for me, white dogshit and Tom Baker Doctor Who. They only know the constructed mythology which appeals to a togetherness that never happened. This is ideal for creating a blindness to class, and injustice, and to suggesting that the world is simply getting worse because people are just awful nowadays.
So the history can go hang - the important thing is the mythology; its cultural half-memories and deployments based on a notion of isolation against outside assault in a time of war, and of a nation’s triumph.
And as Cummings and Johnson show, this kind of mythic recirculation is extremely useful.
Florence Nightingale, Suffering Servant
And so we come to the second myth of the Coronavirus crisis: the toiling, selfless nurse, the Florence Nightingale who is there to help us and care for us at those unavoidable moments of human tragedy. This is a newer one in the Cummings-Johnson arsenal, and much needed at a time when all the conflicts and crises of the socio-economic strategies of the last 10 years are coming to a head. Boris’ sudden hospitalisation could not be more perfect, and is just the kind of happy happenstance that the Cummings evil bullshit machine looks forward to exploiting.
Let’s not forget that Florence Nightingale Hospital has been built because the NHS didn’t have anything like the capacity to deal with all the people about to get seriously ill from the crisis - especially when the strategy was herd immunity, no wait, something else, no wait, herd immunity, no wait, Florence Nightingale. In other words, the hospital, and most of all, the myth of the suffering noble nurse, is a rhetorical answer to the fact that they have deliberately and systematically rendered us unprepared for a crisis such as this over the course of the last 10 years.
This crisis is at least partly a result of the Tory party’s brutal decimation of our NHS and social care systems. Same in other neoliberal countries. The pandemic is not a natural disaster. It is one that has been allowed to happen, in the form it has, by social and economic structures and ideological decisions. (Decisions that, remember, the population voted for a matter of weeks ago, against the alternative of massive NHS reinvestment, renationalisation of public services, and increased workers’ rights.)
Nurses who are rushed off their feet, sobbing, and even dying, aren’t doing that because they are society’s guardian angels whose role in humanity is to save us from tragedy outside of our control. They are underpaid, underprovided, and there are too few of them. They are often treated like shit. They can’t even get their training paid for any more - which is one reason there are so few of them. They are being told to go back home and that we don’t need their services if they are foreign, because they are not earning sufficient money for the powers that be - money which those self-same powers have declined to pay them.
The pandemic has happened like this because a Tory Government cut public health provision, social care, local authority budgets, staffing, and equipment for the NHS, beyond the barest bones. Just as they closed hospitals, and now tell vital migrant key workers to go back where they came from (okay, another year, but no more, mind you).
This crisis is not a natural fact like gravity or God’s plagues. This is a result of the deliberate destruction of our public sector. Meanwhile there is a gleeful rubbing of hands from some quarters by those who profit from disaster capitalism such as the hedge funds popular with some members of the ERG.
As ever, it is a marvellous distraction to wax lyrical about the myth of the Lady of the Lamp guardian angel as if this crisis, and those health professionals, were some transhistorical, transcendent law of nature. But never forget, they are suffering like this, and we are suffering like this, because of untrammelled, unrestrained, vampiric capitalism. And capitalism is not a force of nature. It is a creation of man.
Why do we swallow this?
The final question is: why do we buy this? Well, first of all one of the strengths of myths is that they tend to be attractive, well-structured stories, or images which we find gratifying aesthetically as much as anything. They also base themselves on what has gone before, creating an unbroken line with the beliefs and myths we grew up with. Therefore they ‘feel’ true because they are deeply connected to (and formed part of) the ways in which we learned to understand the world.
But I think especially now, it’s both more, and less, than that. Many of the population and the public at large are buying into, and welcoming, these myths because they have a lot of skin in the game. That is because ‘we’ the people have chosen exactly this, via the ballot box for at least 10, perhaps up to 40 years. So while the populace may partly be having the wool pulled over its eyes, some of these myths are a welcome self-delusion. They allow us to avoid the confrontations with our own culpability and blame, since many of us have - a matter of weeks ago, most recently - casually, and callously, given these vampires, incompetents, thugs and ideologues, the licence to do these terrible, terrible things, via the ballot box.
And which, until people finally stop voting for them, they will continue to do - for at least 5 years from now.
And make no mistake - the myth of the Florence Nightingale who saved Boris - white, from New Zealand, no visa issues - will be rolled out every time the next cut comes. ‘As you know, Florence Nightingale SELFLESSLY SAVED MY LIFE. And that is precisely why we must sell another bit of the NHS to Richard Branson….’
A list of every MP who voted against a nurse payrise